While we are talking impeachment and this is over: This below is some pasta of a professor of history, so it is not some kind of iron clad thing but please explain to me why impeaching Obama makes sense again? If to get rid of the two hags he put on the court it would be worth it. Not new, but called new for asking the question. Is there some other opinions out there? thanx in advance

The Constitution allows only two penalties as a result of impeachment: removal from office, and being banned from holding future federal office.

Technically, it is probably the case that Congress could impeach a President who had left office in order to prevent them from holding future office in the Federal government. This would not only prevent a one-term president from returning to seek another term at a later time, but would prevent a former president from running for Congress or serving in the cabinet of a future president or as a federal judge or Supreme Court justice. However, it’s hard not to see this as a huge waste of Congress’s time.

If a former President committed wrongdoing that would justify impeachment even after they left office, they probably have also committed federal crimes that could be more easily prosecuted through the criminal justice system. Impeachment is not a criminal process; you cannot be sent to jail because you were impeached. So for Congress to bother going through the lengthy and contentious impeachment process instead of simply getting out of the way while the former president in question is prosecuted in criminal court would seem… well, like a waste of everyone’s time. And if there was not enough evidence for a criminal conviction, then it becomes even harder to understand why Congress would take this step. You cannot serve in the cabinet or as a federal judge without Senate confirmation, so any former president who had committed acts worthy of impeachment could easily be blocked by the Senate from holding such positions (and if you don’t have the votes in the Senate to block confirmation to an executive or judicial appointment, then you definitely do not have the 2/3 majority required in the Senate for conviction of impeachment charges.) As for elective office, well, that’s really up to the voters to decide, but someone whom Congress was prepared to impeach even though they are not actively in office would probably also be someone who was not very popular with the public (members of Congress are less likely to vote to impeach and convict someone if their own constituents do not support their doing so.)

So there appears to be little practical value in this approach.

However, there is some precedent for the idea. In the 1870s, Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, was impeached on charges of corruption and bribery. He resigned his cabinet post before the House could actually vote to impeach him, but the House went ahead and impeached him anyway. There was a lengthy debate in the Senate over whether it had the power to put Belknap on trial for the charges brought by the House, since Belknap had resigned. In the end the trial went forward, but Belknap fell short of the 2/3 majority needed for conviction even though the evidence of his corruption was clear; most of the Senators who voted against conviction did so because they believed the Senate lacked jurisdiction to try him now that he was out of office. But the fact that he was impeached and put on trial after resigning nevertheless could serve as a precedent for doing so to someone else again in the future.

Like I said above, it would just be really hard to see what the point of it would be.